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Friday, 3 March 2017

Picturing the Raj by Debra Daley

‘Patna is a place
of great traffic’, Jemima Kindersley noted, when she visited the ancient chief
city of Bihar in 1767. ‘The English Company have one of their most considerable
factories there, where they carry on a great trade in saltpetre, besides opium,
salt, betelnut and tobacco.’ Patna had been of commercial importance to Britain
since the middle of the 18th century – and an apt place, I found, to sow the
seeds of a plot that would hang on the machinations of the East India Company.
The novel I was inspired to write, The Revelations of Carey Ravine, was
published last year, but it’s taken me until now to finish disposing of the box
files of ephemera (print-outs, notes and general papery stuff) that I
accumulated during the writing. I’m working on a new novel now and I would prefer
not to have the ghosts of the old ones in the room.

However, I don't
feel that I can leave the India research behind without saluting the artists
whose work showed me the physical appearance of Patna in the very early 19th
century. Without the views of Charles D’Oyly, Thomas Daniell, Sita Ram, Shiva
Lal, Walter Sherwill, and numbers of anonymous illustrators, I couldn’t have
properly described that city. When storytelling springs from a past that
existed before the advent of photography, you have to ferret around for every
shred of visual evidence you can get. These paintings and drawings allowed me to
construct a pictorial tour of Patna. I pinned up the images next to my desk in
a sequence – as if, having won a coveted contract to work in the opium trade as
a factor for the East India Company, I found myself bound upriver from Calcutta
for Patna for the first time, on my way to present a letter of introduction at
Bankipore, a western suburb of Patna where British interests were concentrated.

Sir Charles D'Oyly, artist unknown, late 18th century.

Charles D’Oyly was
an India hand through and through, a prolific amateur artist and a generous
host to British visitors. He was born in India at Murshidabad, where his father
was the East India Company’s resident at the court of Nawab Babar Ali, and held
many senior postings in the Bengal Civil Service. He spent thirteen years in
Patna and documented the city extensively. Reaching Patna
from Calcutta, an upriver journey of four hundred miles, was quite an effort in
those days. You were obliged to wait until the end of the monsoon season and
even then the undertaking could last as long as eight or nine weeks. D’Oyly’s
view of Rajmahal shows the typical mode of transport – a bulky barge known as a
budgerow, with rudimentary cabins. This one has a palanquin stowed on the cabin
roof for use on shore.

A view of the Rajmahal Hills, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 1820.

You would travel
in a flotilla of smaller craft carrying stores, baggage and kitchen, sometimes
by oar, and sometimes by haulage. Progress up the Ganges was exceedingly slow.
‘We found it extremely tedious,’ Mrs Kindersley reported. Imagine the relief
and elation when, one morning, you catch sight of four great towers in the
distance, their eastern faces lit by the rising sun. Here is the city of Patna,
at last. And here is my first 18th century view of it, in a handcoloured
aquatint by Thomas Daniell.

City of Patna, Thomas Daniell, 1795.

Fortified in the
Indian manner, with a wall and a small citadel, Patna’s prospect is a romantic
one, commanding the high southern bank of the Ganges. The towers, the bastions
projecting into the river, the elevated terraced mansions – it all looks splendidly
established and must have inspired confidence in new East India Company
employees, arriving to take up their commissions.

Thomas Daniell
recorded Patna on a long tour he made through British India, accompanied by his
nephew, William. He was an English artist of humble origins, who arrived in
Calcutta via China in 1786, with his nephew, hoping to make his fortune in the
fabulous sub-continent, like so many men of his day. Daniell never found the
wealthy patron that he sought, but the East India Company gave him a contract
as an engraver and he spent seven years making views of ‘oriental scenery in
Hindoostan’, which was to become his stock-in-trade on his return to England. His India tour provided him with an enduring livelihood.

Thomas Daniell, R.A., Sir David Wilkie, 1838.

Along with other British
travelling artists such as John Zoffany and William Hodges, the Daniells found
employment in India training Indian artists – many of them former Mughal court
painters who had lost their patrons – to adapt their work to the naturalistic
conventions appreciated by the western art market. This Indo-British school of
painting is known as Company Style, or sometimes as Patna or Bazar paintings. Some commentators have been sneery about Company pictures,
dismissing them as inferior art, but as a visual record of the past, especially
of everyday details – domestic interiors, realistic renderings of
tools and equipment,images of Indians
and their costumes, often categorized by regional and ethnic type, or
occupation, and so on – Company paintings are packed with information that is
historically valuable and culturally fascinating. They offer a
glimpse into the lives of artisans and servants, the provincial and
non-privileged, which I can appreciate even as I note that inhabitants of
the Company frame are defined by their functions and not by their subjectivity.
Like cartes de visite later in the century, the image-making seems designed to
serve collectors and to illustrate rather than express.

Shiva Lal was a
prominent Company artist, who sold his work from the art-shop that he ran in
Patna. The painting above comes from a series of nineteen illustrating processes in
the manufacture of opium at the Gulzarbagh factory in Patna. The
paintings were commissioned by Dr D. R. Lyall (the personal assistant in charge
of opium-making) for a series of murals in the factory. But Lyall’s death in
1857, during the Indian Mutiny, meant the scheme was abandoned.

It was a journey
of about half an hour, as the crow flies, from the eastern ghat at Patna to the
opium factory at Guzulbargh, but it would inevitably take much, much longer
than that. After disembarking at the ghat, where you would be met by a heaving
crowd of hawkers and drivers of every description looking for custom, you might
settle for an ox-carriage with some fancy drapery, rigged against the heat and
the dust, as your conveyance. Off the carriage lumbers through Patna’s eastern
gate and into the chowk (market), where Patna’s specialties are heaped high –
opium, saltpetre, striped cotton rugs and hookahs with curiously-worked silver chillums,
and piles of produce. The hookah purveyors in their doorways blow on the
charcoal in the chillum and the fragrance of Persian tobacco, herbs and spices and
rosewater drifts through the air.

Main street of Patna, showing one side of the chowk, Sita Ram, 1814-15.

The painter Sita Ram, artist unknown, c.1820.

The views, above, of
Patna’s chowk were painted by an accomplished Indian watercolourist named Sita
Ram, whose work, with its impressionistic brushwork and architectural finesse
(he had trained as a draughtsman), transcended the Company Style. The
watercolours belong to a set of albums commissioned by Lord Hastings,
governor-general of Bengal from 1814 until 1823. Sita Ram undertook the work as
he travelled with Hastings’s retinue on a seventeen-month journey from Calcutta
to Punjab to inspect British possessions. He continued to work for
Hastings until the governor-general’s departure from India in 1823. After that,
Sita Ram disappeared from the record and no more is known of him.

The bazaar in Patna City, Sir Charles D'Oyly

Once you’re in the
thick of Patna, the city seems rather less imposing than its beguiling riverfront
aspect promised. There is only one main street, with many crooked lanes leading
off it, and the backs of those grand mansions fronting the river are dilapidated.
The ordinary dwelling houses are built of brick or of baked mud, with roofs of
thatch or crumbling tiles and screens of bamboo mats. Many of them have shops
on the ground, open to the street. Traffic churns the street to mud, but now
that the rains have lifted the mud will soon dry and turn to choking dust.

The real might of
Patna lies beyond the fourth great bastion of the city wall. It is the compound
of the English Factory at Guzulbargh, headquarters of the East India Company’s
commercial activities in Patna. The compound used to be a military store, but
has now been made over to opium agents. The jail is included in this compound.

The English Factory compound, Patna, Sita Ram, 1814.

Opium warehouse, Patna, Sita Ram, 1814.

A stacking room in the opium factory, Patna, W.S. Sherwill, c.1850.

The manufacture of
opium at the Patna factory was recorded in great detail by Captain Walter
Sherwill, who was a revenue surveyor in the Bengal Army. He produced a
compelling series of drawings that communicates the vast scale and the
operational efficiency of the Company’s opium business.

Opium fleet descending the Ganges on the way to Calcutta,W.S. Sherwill, c.1850.

Opium was carried
from the factory to the ghat at Guzulbargh and floated out to the opium fleet. The ships were preceded on the river
by small canoes, the crews of which sounded the depth of water and pounded
drums to warn other boats out of the channel, as the government fleet claimed
right-of-way. It must have been intimidating, and also impressive, to hear the beat
of those drums as the opium fleet approached on its deadly business. The timber
raft of Nepalese logs in the foreground of Sherwill’s image has been floated
down from the mountains, and will be used to make packing-cases for the opium.

Western gateway of Patna City, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 1824.

After passing
through Patna’s western gateway you reach a wooded landscape, where native mud
houses are gradually being displaced by British residences.

Houses near Patri Ghat, western suburbs, Charles D'Oyly, 1824.

Farther out, there
are large garden houses. Your driver enters a compound enclosed by a low wall. Across
an expanse of beaten earth lies a white bungalow with a high thatched roof, an
unrailed veranda and doorways hung with screens of grass. You are surprised at
first by the lack of garden, at least in your conception of it. There are only
a few trees near the walls, mostly palm and plantain. The paths are spread with
gravel to impede the passage of snakes.

John Havell's bungalow in its garden, Sita Ram, 1810-22.

And this is it.
Here you are. With a letter of introduction to hand, you descend from the
carriage. The air is noisy with the cawing of the crows, the scratching of the
sweepers’ brooms, smoothing the earth around the house, and the lowing of yoked
bullocks plodding to the well in a corner of the compound. The steward of the house
appears on the veranda and greets you with a salaam.

There is so much
about this world that is corrupt and complicated – and yet, its glamour
persists.

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